When Leonard reflected on the prewar world in which he had grown up, he tended to stress the social and intellectual progress his generation had enjoyed. Although his father’s premature death had placed the family in straitened circumstances, he recalled his youth, especially his years at Cambridge, as a sort of golden age. As he later observed: “Anyone who was a young man at the beginning of this century will remember that at that time the future seemed to contain a real possibility of greater prosperity and happiness, of a wider and deeper civilization, for human beings than had ever existed in their previous history” (War for Peace, 236).
In these formative years he gained in self-confidence, no longer apprehensive that he would be stigmatized because of his Jewish background, his intellectuality, or his lack of social connections. As the first Jew to be elected to the elite Apostles, he found among its number kindred spirits who shared his enthusiasm for philosophical disputation and modern literature. The coming of war in 1914 transformed these optimistic expectations into a nightmare that permanently altered his perspective on the world. Always prone to epochal pronouncements, he came to believe that it destroyed “the bases of European civilization” (Downhill, 9) and “the hope that human beings were becoming civilized—a hope not unreasonable at the beginning of the twentieth century” (Journey, 10).
At first the ongoing disruptions in his domestic life overshadowed the war news. Virginia had attempted suicide in 1913, and her recovery was spasmodic at best over the next few years. “In many ways 1914 and 1915 were years which we simply lost out of our lives, for we lived them in the atmosphere of catastrophe or impending catastrophe” (Beginning, 166). International politics had never impinged on his personal life or his intellectual pursuits before 1914, and few of his Cambridge contemporaries foresaw the events that now unfolded. Yet it was immediately after the war had begun that he embarked on his seminal analysis of international government for the Fabian Society, a project that dominated his professional life for the better part of two years and constituted his singular contribution to the postwar settlement.
Leonard was initially opposed to the war, viewing it as senseless, the result of miscalculations by diplomats and generals. Accustomed to a dangerous but relatively peaceful world, he found it difficult to comprehend why “millions of men, most of them young, suddenly began to try to kill one another” (Deluge, i. 19). He believed that British leaders, who might have averted its outbreak, should never have become involved. Failure to resolve the conflict quickly, as well as mounting casualties, ultimately convinced him that Germany should be resisted. In later recollections he was not as equivocal about his support for the war effort: “Many of us hold that it was right for the Empire to fight with France and Belgium against Germany in 1914” (War for Peace, 46). On a personal level, he was less sanguine about the role he might play. Never regarding himself as a total pacifist, he lacked a basis for claiming conscientious objection, as Bloomsbury friends such as Strachey and Duncan Grant did, once conscription was extended to include married men up to the age of 41. Four of his brothers joined up; Cecil and Philip served as cavalry officers in France, where Cecil was killed in November 1917 when a shell burst during an attempted rescue of a wounded soldier, and Leonard may have felt pangs of conscience about not having followed their example. Such feelings would have stemmed from family solidarity rather than patriotic sentiment. Rationalizing his response, he insisted that, “if I had not been married or even if Virginia had been well, I should probably have joined up, because, though I hated the war, I felt and still feel an irresistible desire to experience everything” (Beginning, 177). Or so he explained it in 1964. Such bravado, however, was less evident in the moment. Strachey found Leonard alarmed at the prospect of compulsory military service or jail, thus abandoning Virginia to the care of others. He confided to Margaret Llewellyn Davies: “I feel I am a conscientious objector—for I loathe the thought of taking any part in this war—& yet I feel very much the difficulty, from the point of view of reason.”1 Since he could not seek exemption on grounds of religious compunction or committed pacifist beliefs, he would attempt to evade conscription because of health—his and Virginia’s. He approached Dr Maurice Wright, whom he had consulted in 1914 about his trembling hands and Virginia’s mental condition. Having treated him unsuccessfully for a congenital tremor and nervous exhaustion, the physician never doubted that Leonard was unfit for military service and readily furnished a statement for submission at his military examination. He also alluded to Virginia’s history of mental breakdowns and Leonard’s pivotal role in nursing her during these crises. As a result of a medical examination and Wright’s testimonial, he was temporarily exempted in May 1916.2 He told Violet Dickinson that “His Majesty’s Army has decided that I am totally unfit to be used in any way by my country.”3 His relief was mingled with humiliation at having his familial trembling hands referred to as “senile tremor.” When he was summoned again before the tribunal in October 1917, Wright testified that his nervous condition and low body weight (132 pounds) would render him incapable of enduring mental or physical fatigue without his health failing. Recurrent bouts of malaria and stress-induced, crippling headaches may have contributed to the diagnosis of ill health, although Leonard was physically resilient and athletic. In November, just before his thirty-seventh birthday, he was granted a total exemption from military service.
Once International Government was published, two months after Leonard had received his provisional military exemption, his growing reputation created opportunities in the world of political journalism. Writing on international affairs for such progressive periodicals as War and Peace, International Review, and Contemporary Review increased his visibility and led to regular employment as a reviewer for the New Statesman and for the Nation. His Labour Party activity was expanding, especially after his appointment in the spring of 1918 as secretary of the Advisory Committee on International Questions (ACIntQ). The First World War, in which he played no military role, ultimately shaped his career—as an authority on international relations, as a political journalist, and as a Labour Party functionary. At the same time he and Virginia busied themselves with the Hogarth Press, launched in 1917 as an avocation, but ultimately entailing a serious professional commitment. He had found his footing while losing the exuberant optimism of the prewar decades. The advent of peace signaled for him the end of civilization as he knew it: “In 1914 in the background of one’s life and one’s mind there were light and hope; by 1918 one had unconsciously accepted a perpetual public menace and darkness and had admitted into the privacy of one’s mind or soul an iron fatalistic acquiescence in insecurity and barbarism” (Downhill, 9). Nor was this merely a subjective response. His psychological reaction paled when compared to the human consequences: “the sum of concentrated human misery was during those years probably greater than human beings had ever experienced before” (Deluge, i. 22).
Although advocacy of the League of Nations in the 1920s stemmed from his conviction about the inherent value of an international system, it remained at its core a means to avoid the recurrence of war by resolving disputes peaceably. While he continued to regard prewar German policy as “indefensible,” his reading of self-exculpatory memoirs by European statesmen reaffirmed his sense that “they were all of them responsible for the war, and that if they or people like them are allowed to control policy again, the same thing will happen again.”4 Despite inability to realize its potential, Leonard never relinquished his belief that the League or an equivalent structure was the only means of saving the world from the catastrophe of war or repairing it after destructive conflict. Until the rise of Hitler he continued to stress that it was imperative to strengthen the League in order to curb potential aggressors. Few British writers on foreign affairs recognized as early as Leonard the true nature of the Nazi regime. Germany, he proclaimed within months of Hitler’s ascent to power, had become “one of the most savage and senseless dictatorships that has been tolerated by a civilized European population for at least two centuries.”5
A gloomy prognosis permeated his introduction to the edited volume The Intelligent Man’s Way to Prevent War, published by Victor Gollancz in 1933, a precursor of the Left Book Club, launched three years later. Here Leonard described the war of 1914–18 as “a big step on the road back to barbarism.” Despite a temporary reprieve in the 1920s, the barbarians had breached the frontiers of civilization and were destroying it from within. He warned that civilization could not survive another world war: “If there is another war, the barbarians will finally triumph.”6 The book’s contributors, including Norman Angell, Will Arnold-Forster, and Viscount Cecil, offered ideas about how to prevent war by subjecting sovereign nations to international law and pooled security. All of them feared the rise of virulent nationalism and dictatorship as an obstacle to a peaceful resolution of conflict. If the self-sufficient state and economic nationalism prevail, “pacifism, liberty, democracy, socialism can have no place.” Yet, so long as the majority of people were opposed to war, they had the power to prevent it by opting for those policies elucidated in the book: conciliation, disarmament, collective security, and adherence to international law.7 To be sure, these exhortations were addressed to “the intelligent man” in Britain, presumably a League supporter with progressive inclinations, not designed for consumption in the Fascist states. Two years later he intervened in a New Statesman debate, chiefly between Angell and Brailsford, about the causes of war. While Angell blamed psychological delusions, Brailsford identified capitalism as the culprit. Leonard, eschewing mono-causal explanations, observed that “the causes of war are much too complex and multifarious to be covered exclusively either by economics or by psychology.” Socialists needed to acknowledge the psychological factors that prompted millions to fight against their own economic interests. Whatever motivated combatants, “the imperialist structure of capitalist society must almost inevitably sooner or later produce war.”8
Clear-eyed about the prospects for war, Leonard remained in a quandary about national armaments, which the League was intended either to eliminate or to internationalize. Collective security, and, even more, military sanctions, required weapons, but far from relinquishing their stockpiles, many states were competing to outpace rivals, and Germany was openly violating imposed strictures against rearmament. Unregulated armaments were a prescription for catastrophe. When Stephen Spender asked in 1934 whether he thought war was coming, Leonard replied: “Yes, of course. Because when the nations enter into an armaments race, as they are doing at present, no other end is possible.”9 For him, the disarmament problem was “the pivot of the movement away from international government and peace.…The world can choose between armed nationalism and disarmed internationalism; it cannot have both at the same time.”10 He attributed the growth of Hitlerism to the refusal of the major powers to reach an agreement on arms control and continued to view disarmament as the precondition for preventing war. Leonard rejected unilateral British disarmament and isolation, as proposed by Frank Hardie, the organizer of the Oxford Union “King and Country” debate, but conceded that mandatory sanctions against an aggressor was “much too dangerous in the world of today.”11 As he told Noel-Baker:
You know that I entirely agree with you about collective security and that nothing but it can stand between the world and war. The disorientation in the forces on the Left with regard to the League is appalling. The sanctions madmen I have never been able to understand: they are people who believe in political absolute truths and like all absolutists end in the clouds or the mire.12
With the League’s failure to constrain Japanese expansion and the collapse of the Disarmament Conference, he warned that “only a drastic revolution in the League itself, in the aims and policies of the existing governments, and in the whole European situation could make the League of today an effective instrument for peace and justice.” Labour’s foreign policy should aim at restoring a system for ensuring international accord by avoiding reliance on national armaments. To pursue a policy of rearmament in the face of League impotence would be to “throw power into the hands not of socialists, but of fascists.”13 Defending collective security to the point of armed sanctions against an aggressor, Leonard quarreled with Kingsley Martin, who was apprehensive lest military action, even under League auspices, degenerate into a capitalist, imperialist war. Having long argued that pooled force did not constitute old-fashioned war, he admonished the pacifist left for its lack of realism. The notion that it was possible to select a policy that would result in absolute good was absurd: “in 999,999 cases out of a million, the choice is between two evils and two courses both of which will lead to evil…”14
During the autumn of 1934 Leonard embarked on the first of several polemical books, Quack, Quack!, striking a far more satirical tone than earlier works on international government or economic imperialism. Sparked by the Nazi rise to power and such alarming events as the recent Nuremberg rally, he drew an analogy between Hitler and Mussolini and witch doctors who utilized magic and animal savagery to control primitive peoples. He included photographs of the two dictators, declaiming their political quackery, alongside effigies of the Polynesian war god Kukailimoko to show a remarkable resemblance. During periods in which civilized values were cherished, reason and knowledge predominated, but when war or economic crisis produced communal misery, “the superstitions of the savage creep back into popularity…and everywhere is heard the great quacking of the quacks” (Quack, 19). This belief in the efficacy of magic, emblematic of primitive society, contained by civilization, was never far below the surface. Even in the most civilized societies there was a “submerged army of primitive men” ready to throw their weight on the side of unreason. The refusal of the cultured elite to share their advantages with the masses turned many who might have upheld civilized values into an “unholy alliance with the barbarians” (Quack, 25–7). It was the assertion not merely of reason against quackery and freedom against despotism, but of equality against privilege that was essential to sustain civilization in the face of barbarism. Fascism, the supreme example of the revival of savagery and magic, exploited the herd instinct of the populace, intoxicated “by the incantations of charlatans and fanatics, by the persecution of defenseless people, by the frenzy of military bands, marches, processions, goose-steps, and the ceaseless bull-roaring of the radio” (Quack, 44). Nor should these dictators be dismissed as cynical egoists: it was “the quack who believes in his quackery who does the damage and can destroy a whole civilization.” Fascist Italy scarcely differed from past despotic oligarchies; Hitlerism, similarly irrational, was “more brutal, more efficient, and more uncompromisingly stupid.” Mein Kampf, a “clarion call to the emotions of violent militant nationalism,” was a manifesto that employed fear and hatred as means to destroy political reason. The corollary of barbarism was the suppression of dissent by imprisoning or executing opponents. He warned that a people cannot be savage in politics while remaining civilized in their social life (Quack, 69–72).
In Quack, Quack! Leonard broached the subject of anti-Semitism for the first time since his early fictional writings. The Nazi persecution of Jews, the most flagrant form of the “irrational, uncivilized, scapegoat-hunting psychology,” marked a reversion to savagery, epitomized in the doctrine of Aryan superiority. He compared it, rather paradoxically, to the Soviet attack on the capitalist and the bourgeoisie, concluding that “in this hunting and persecution of public scapegoats we have reached the nadir of political quackery and the present revolt against civilization” (Quack, 103–5). Anti-Semitism, treated only obliquely in the text, received a more trenchant critique in a separate appendix. The Hogarth edition of 2,000 copies, published in May 1935 and favorably reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement,15 nearly sold out within the first year; an American edition, published by Harcourt, Brace appeared in September, making this commercially his most successful book to date.
Why did Leonard relegate anti-Semitism to a special “Note” at the end of his book? Perhaps it was because he felt that it transcended his denunciation of Nazi propaganda; if he, as a Jew, were finally to address a problem he had so long avoided, it needed to be considered in a broader historical context. He questioned whether Hitler could succeed where Nebuchadnezzar and so many others had failed. The Jew had “become a professional world scapegoat and has instinctively acquired a technique of resistance to persecution and annihilation.” Jews could not fail to recognize that the racial indictment represented a “revolt against civilization, a reversion to the primitive quackery of superstition.” Nor was it surprising that the Jew was stigmatized, given that his cultural roots stretched back long before the Aryans emerged:
For two thousand years they have been the traditions, not of the jungle and the tribe, not of hatred and savagery, but of civilization. Wherever a civilization has flourished for a short time in Europe, the Jew has lived close to it and in it, has thrown himself into it with energy and enthusiasm. Therefore the Jew has, not in his blood, but in his mind, the traditions both of his own and of a world civilization.
(Quack, 196–7)
Even if the Jew were to accept the “superstitious nonsense about race and blood,” he could demonstrate that in a world of mongrels, his blood was purer than most. “He belongs to a ‘race’ which was building a civilization in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates thousands of years before the ‘Aryan’ had emerged from the squalor and savagery of his jungle or steppe” (Quack, 198). Despite his ancestors’ belief in a savage tribal God and in themselves as a chosen people, they “reached a stage of civilization at which they understood the supreme obligation to pursue knowledge and use reason and to value them socially above wealth and power” (Quack, 200). No Jew need feel shame in belonging to a lineage responsible for the Ten Commandments, Ecclesiastes, and the Psalms, Isaiah, Christ, Montaigne, Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Einstein, Proust, and Freud. Through the centuries Jews had been scattered “like dust over the face of the earth,” sometimes abandoning their religious beliefs or racial consciousness, but the ingrained traditions of their own civilization survived:
They have learnt in the ghettos of Europe the meaning of quackery and superstition, the effect of hatred, the value of reason, tolerance, and humanity. The Jew may indeed feel that perhaps after all, as a civilized man, a man into whose mind the lessons of civilization have been burnt by bitter experience, he is an appropriate victim when unfortunate people in the state of mind of the German Nazis are searching for a scapegoat. (Quack, 201)
It would be difficult to find anywhere in Leonard’s writing a more poignant credo, reflecting an identity intrinsic to his very being. He was 55 when he wrote this defense of the Jew in a Christian world, threatened by Nazi persecution, if not yet by genocide. It took a concerted effort on his part to shed his assimilationist carapace and to avow pride in his heritage. Although he rarely mentions anti-Semitism in his autobiography or in his other books, he was impelled in 1935 to denounce it, not merely as a cultivated Englishman or as an internationalist, but as a Jew.
Charles Singer, a Jewish physician and professor at the University of London active in assisting academic victims of Nazi persecution, wrote to him to praise Quack, Quack! Calling for the publication of a cheap edition likely to attract a wider audience, he urged Leonard to lessen its criticism of the British monarchy and to eliminate the appendix on anti-Semitism as a way of appealing to conservatives. Leonard initially rejected any suggestion that he temper his more controversial remarks in a second edition, published only a year later, lest it appear that he had changed his mind. “My experience,” he responded, “is that it is fatal to cut out arguments which people will not like.…If I write about the German quackery and cut out all reference to the English, I only bolster up and cover up the very thing which it was my purpose to uncover.”16 Upon reconsideration, however, he conceded that “the more one disagrees with criticism of one’s own writing, the more likely one is to be wrong.”17 Without altering the text appreciably, he softened his ridicule of deference to the royal family and, more surprisingly, omitted the appendix on anti-Semitism in the later edition. Whether he had second thoughts about such avowed self-exposure, or feared that his remarks might offend British sensibilities, or because the milder manifestations of anti-Semitism he had witnessed in England paled beside the virulent race hatred prevalent in Nazi Germany remains enigmatic.18 Whatever the reason, the cheap edition of 1936 sold well enough to warrant a reprint the next year.
With the manuscript of Quack, Quack! finished by the beginning of March, 1935, it seems barely credible that only two months later the Woolfs, planning to drive in their Lanchester convertible to Rome, where Vanessa Bell had rented a house, should have chosen a route through Germany. Harold Nicolson informed Leonard that the Foreign Office recommended that Jews avoid travel in Germany. He also consulted Foreign Office counsellor Ralph Wigram, a Sussex neighbor, who, while concurring with Nicolson, added privately that the Woolfs need not fear to go to Germany as long as they did not get mixed up in a Nazi procession or public ceremony. Wigram introduced him to Prince Bismarck at the German Embassy, who supplied a letter calling on German officials to show every courtesy to the distinguished visitors. Leonard found it “absurd that any Englishman, whether Jew or Gentile, should hesitate to enter a European country,” on the presumption that British authorities would ensure that an English Jew would be treated no differently from any other subject (Downhill, 185). They traveled with his pet marmoset, Mitz, who often perched on his shoulder as they drove through several German cities and on to Austria and Italy. Although they encountered a procession in Bonn, where Nazi storm troopers were as prolific as anti-Jewish banners, the marmoset—das liebe kleine Ding—proved a goodwill emissary, captivating crowds of Hitler’s supporters as they passed by. First-hand observations of the way that the Nazi regime had transformed the populace reinforced the impressions conveyed in Quack, Quack! As he commented in the New Statesman: “You cannot be 24 hours in a totalitarian or fascist state without realizing that there is a psychological relationship between the rulers and the ruled which does not exist—except in war time—in democratic countries.”19
While managing to avoid any direct confrontation, Leonard perceived “something sinister and menacing in the Germany of 1935” (Downhill, 192). He was never to visit Germany again. By way of contrast, Italy seemed to have reached a critical point, with patriotic enthusiasm and the veneer of efficiency crumbling. The moment would inevitably come when the dictator, whether Mussolini or Hitler, would be “faced by the emotional deflation of his subjects and his only chance of reinflating them and himself is by war.”20
It was the duplicity of Britain and France in failing to impose effective sanctions against Italy after its invasion of Abyssinia that convinced Leonard of the League’s fatal debility. An embargo on oil shipments would have halted Italian aggression, revitalizing the mechanism of collective security. As late as November 1935 he could still write to his nephew, Julian Bell, then in China, that “the League is the only last possible faint hope of preventing a world war.”21 Four months later that hope had evaporated: a prophetic letter to Julian warned: “It is now going to be simply a race between the economic breakdown of the Fascist governments and a European war.…The [British] Govt has to all intents and purposes destroyed the collective security system.”22 In a pamphlet published in a Hogarth series, Leonard decried British foreign policy as “muddle-headed, vacillating, inconsistent, paying lip-service to the League and its system, but continually in practice repudiating the obligations the fulfilment of which could alone give reality to the League system of peace, disarmament, and collective security.”23 The only chance of forestalling war would be to guarantee that an act of war against one would be treated as an act of war against all. By proposing to limit commitments, regionalizing the obligation to aid victims of aggression, British leaders adopted the best course “for wobbling along into the abyss.” If it was not prepared to shoulder the burdens of collective security, the only viable alternative would be an alliance, but instead the Baldwin government chose rearmament, oblivious to evidence that “such competition in arming by Great Powers always has, and always will, lead to war between them.”24 Leonard refuted pacifist writer Helena Swanwick’s rejection of sanctions, insisting that, “if the governments of Britain and France had set themselves to right wrongs, conditions would have been established in which the League would have worked and peace in Europe might not have been broken for 25 or 50 years.”25
In July 1936 Leonard wrote a memorandum for the ACIntQ on the attitude Labour should adopt towards proposed League reforms. In his view the core of the covenant was the collective security system, whose ultimate test was the willingness of member states to disarm. The condition of League membership should be compliance with a mutually determined level of military and naval strength, consistent with the needs of collective defense, and the abolition of private manufacture of weapons. But he recognized that successive defeats in Manchuria and Abyssinia had undermined any belief that collective commitments would be fulfilled. This was why “governments are everywhere feverishly rearming and why in this country there is a movement towards isolation and extreme pacifism.” Since denial of the universal obligation was a fait accompli, the most plausible alternative would probably be regional pacts, which Leonard had inveighed against earlier, committed to support militarily victims of aggression in limited areas. Whatever the intentions of the League’s founders, small states were even hard pressed to participate in collective action in their own neighborhood, much less in distant corners of the world. He recognized that eliminating universality would destroy the system of collective security, enabling nations to decide that an act of war against one member was not within their sphere of interest. Nor should Labour expect decisive leadership from the National government, since “it will almost certainly either drift helplessly or entangle itself in commitments according as one or other view temporarily prevails in the Cabinet.” If the party merely reaffirmed its longstanding ties to the League, “it will in effect be supporting a sham, an international system which no governments or peoples any longer believe to be operative or capable of assuring them defense against aggression.”26
The Spanish Civil War convinced him that the League had been irretrievably damaged as an instrument for deterring aggression. Despairingly, he confided to Julian:
I have come myself to be in favour of isolation at any rate as a temporary policy for this country. It is too late to stop a European war by an alliance; in fact it would probably precipitate a war.…The Labour Party does not know its own mind, and that is not a state of mind in which it can put forward a policy of alliance. The best that one can hope is that we may stumble and stagger together into an ignoble policy of isolation, that the guns will not go off or the bombs begin to fall for a year or two, and that something meanwhile “may turn up”.27
Obliged to veil his pessimism in print, he exhorted Labour to undertake “nothing less than a revision of its whole peace policy.”28 He favored a coalition of democratic and socialist states prepared not only to redress legitimate grievances of the Fascist powers, but also to counter any attack on unaligned states, such as Spain. When invited to participate in Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, he responded tersely: “I am for the legal Government and people of Republican Spain and civilization; I am against Franco, Fascism, and barbarism.”29 Despite his antipathy toward the National Government for appeasing the dictators, he reluctantly conceded that mere negativity toward its rearmament program was futile. Without sufficient armaments, the policy of alliance would be a “policy of suicide.” In this Political Quarterly article, while denoting the inevitability of war, he declared that it was not psychologically possible to stand aside and watch “the destruction of everything which one values in society.”30 Rejecting isolation was less a heroic stance than an admission of defeat: the international commonwealth for which he had striven for two decades was now on the edge of the precipice.
During the course of 1937 a more realistic tone crept into his pronouncements, although he held out little hope of achieving his goals. An April ACIntQ memorandum acknowledged that nations no longer based their policies on the League; they were instead trying to avoid war or be on the winning side by rearming and seeking allies. The immediate danger came solely from the Fascist powers, not just through overt aggression, but the prospect that some violent act by a dictator could precipitate a European war. Its prevention would depend on persuading the dictators that war would not pay. Agreement among the pacific powers should also be directed to reconstituting some kind of collective system including smaller states, none of whom would participate unless their security was guaranteed without a reciprocal obligation. In addition, Britain and France should aim at close cooperation with the Soviet Union, without including it in any security agreement to avoid alarming the smaller East European states.31 Later in the year he noted a calmer spirit in Europe, a breathing space that might be used “to stop temporarily, or even perhaps permanently, the drift to war.” The Fascist powers were not ready to risk war, enabling Britain and France to regain the initiative. He now envisaged a common front, in cooperation with the Soviet Union, which “would pursue the policy of resisting aggression, defending democracy, and resuscitating the League.” There were, however, several obstacles to such a forward approach: first, “the hopeless fatalism of rearmament undirected by any policy but that of panic” and, second, the recognition that an international system to prevent war and the defense of the rights of democratic states was untenable under the present National government.32 His short-lived flicker of optimism completely disappeared by the time of the Anschluss in March 1938. If there was still any chance of avoiding war, it required immediate drastic action on the part of Britain and France and a shift in Labour policy. Hitler must be warned that further aggression would be resisted, and Labour should offer to enter a coalition government under Churchill and support conscription and rearmament. Although Leonard’s views were shared by younger Labour politicians, such as Hugh Gaitskell, Douglas Jay, and Evan Durbin, their emissary, A. V. Alexander, failed to overcome the resistance of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Even Leonard’s militancy had its limits; he suffered from ambivalence throughout the Munich crisis, feeling “an immense relief, release, and reprieve, even though…the steps which have led to the avoidance of war…[were] shameful and morally and politically wrong” (Journey, 29).
The last years of peace were, Leonard later noted, “the most horrible period of my life” (Journey, 10). Virginia’s mental state deteriorated again in 1936, as she struggled to complete The Years, which he deemed her worst book, and his own health was precarious in 1937 and 1938. Prostate trouble and diabetes were suspected, though neither was conclusively diagnosed. He was plagued by eczema and worsening tremor, for which he sought relief through Alexander technique treatment to no avail. He and Virginia were devastated by the death of their beloved nephew Julian in Spain in July 1937, needlessly sacrificed, the family believed, to the Republican cause. Above all, the ominous political scene, as well as intensifying Nazi persecution of Jews, took its toll on him psychologically, and for a time his literary output dwindled to little more than reviews and an occasional Political Quarterly article. As he later recalled: “Life became like one of those terrible nightmares in which one tries to flee from some malignant, nameless, formless horror, and one’s legs refuse to work, so that one waits helpless and frozen with fear for inevitable annihilation” (Journey, 11).
For some years Leonard contemplated writing a play in the spirit of Bernard Shaw’s parables about the collapse of civilization. He finally began it in the spring of 1938, as war clouds were darkening. Since he had never attempted a play before, he was sensitive about it, rebuffing Virginia’s queries about when it would be completed. She recorded, somewhat spitefully, “L. writing his play—the one he’s brewed these 10 years.”33 In October he read it to Maynard and Lydia Keynes, who thought it had merit, but repeated attempts to get it staged all proved abortive. The Hotel remains his least well-known published work, and he did not authorize a reprint until 1963. His introduction to the American edition observed that “it was written in the tension of those horrible years of Hitler’s domination and of the feeling that he would inevitably destroy civilization” (Hotel, 5). Set in the foyer of the imaginary Grand Hôtel de l’Univers et du Commerce, the play was populated with stereotypical representatives of the European states and conflicting ideologies, including a British foreign secretary, a Russian communist agent, and a German and Italian Fascist duo. None of them, aside from the hotel proprietor’s idealistic son and a quintessential Wandering Jew, has any redeeming features, as the characters wage a struggle to secure or withhold a consignment of arms for Spain. The cynical capitalist hotelier, Vajoff, oblivious to ideology and national rivalries, cares only for money: “I have no politics. Your fascism, your Nazism, your communism, what are they to me? My concern is business. If you want pianos or machine guns or frigidaires or bombs, I will supply you. But you must pay, gentlemen, you and your Führers and your Duces, you must pay the price” (Hotel, 29). The play, a cross between Heartbreak House and Grand Hotel, ends with concealed bombs exploding and destroying the building. The Jewish character, Jacoby, pathetic but indomitable, is a survivor who refuses to succumb to Nazi oppression:
I was a good German.…I had fought for Germany, and I loved Germany and Breslau where I lived and my house there. Then suddenly they took it all away from me. They drove me out of my profession—I was a lawyer. They drove me out of my house. They beat my son to death in a concentration camp.…I have said to myself, it’s the end, there’s nothing to live for, I shall commit suicide. And yet I don’t. It’s not fear. It’s something inside me which just refuses to give in. Sometimes I say to myself, if Pharoah and old Nebuchadnezzar could not destroy us, I’m damned if I shall let Göring and Göbbels. There’s no sense in it, of course; it’s silly—but there it is.
(Hotel, 88–9)
Increasingly in the 1930s, especially during the Soviet purge trials, Leonard openly excoriated communism as no less a threat to Western culture than Fascism, notwithstanding his advocacy of an Anglo-Soviet military pact. Reviewing the Webbs’ revised Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, he declared:
The Russian Government is a dictatorship and the excuses which the Webbs put forward for the dictatorship in Russia are precisely the same as those which the apologists of Fascism put forward for Hitler and Mussolini.…There is no possible reason why socialism should necessitate dictatorship. There is no such thing and never will be such a thing as dictatorship of the proletariat.34
Given his fulminations against Stalinism, it is implausible that in October 1938 Victor Gollancz commissioned him to write a defense of Western civilization for the avowedly pro-communist Left Book Club. Recanting his earlier indifference to Soviet repression, Gollancz, another Jewish Old Pauline, admitted in the weeks after Munich that his own views had “altered” and that liberal ideas needed to be “defended and preserved.”35 He could think of no one better suited to undertake the task than Leonard, a spokesman for democratic socialism, steeped in liberal values, rather than a typical fellow-travelling LBC author. Leonard was apprehensive, anticipating that his views would offend Gollancz’s fellow directors, Harold Laski and John Strachey: “Some of the topics with which I would deal raise acute controversy among different sections of the Left and I daresay some of my opinions would be much disliked by a good many members of the Left Book Club. I assume I should have complete freedom in the expression of opinion within the law of libel.”36 Although it violated his customary practice, Gollancz consented, offering Leonard £500 for the book, which he completed in six months and submitted in May 1939 with the title Barbarians at the Gate.37 The publisher’s acquiescence did not preclude serious misgivings once he read the manuscript and had to withstand objections from Strachey and Laski. Gollancz claimed that it contained statements liable to be misconstrued by anti-Soviet propagandists.38 If they could not halt publication of a commissioned book, the Left Book Club triumvirate sought to postpone it at least into the next year. What Virginia termed a “letter war” ensued, much to their frustration: “more time frittered, wasted. L. very calm; and how sane.”39 He responded to Gollancz’s complaints by noting that the book had been written in response to an immediate crisis; delay might undermine the pertinence of his argument. What he had foreseen when agreeing to the publisher’s terms had transpired:
I am not hostile to the Soviet Government, but I know that any criticism of that Government or its policy is interpreted by many people as hostility.…I claim to be as good a socialist as any member of the selection committee of the Left Book Club and to be equally desirous with them of the success of the Soviet Union.…It is just because of this that I think it essential to point out errors in policy which seem to me fatal to the ultimate aim of socialism or communism.40
Unrepentant and obdurate, Leonard refused to alter his text on the pretext that criticism of the Soviet Union was inopportune. Nor was he dissuaded by speculation that his views might jeopardize delicate Anglo-Soviet negotiations or prompt resignations from disaffected Left Book Club members. Since Leonard would concede only minor revisions, after facing down his book club critics, who tried to persuade him that Stalin was motivated by the need to defend Soviet communism from internal and external threats, Gollancz could do little to prevent publication. In the end, once the Nazi–Soviet pact had been signed, the obstacles vanished, and the book, published in September 1939, was selected as the November monthly choice. Barbarians at the Gate was the first Left Book Club selection to criticize the Soviet Union openly. Strachey offered a stinging rebuke in the club’s Left News, and Communist Pat Sloan trashed it in Tribune, a review that Leonard claimed “gave me no pain, but a little pleasure because it amused me.”41
In the polemical style of Quack, Quack! the book denounced the resurgence of barbarism while distinguishing among the dictators. Stalin was the heir of Western civilization, embracing egalitarian ideals, whereas Hitler subjected the individual to the will of the leader. Leonard disclaimed any equivalence between the dictatorship of Stalin and those of Hitler and Mussolini: “The Soviet Government, whatever may be the results of its practice, is in its ultimate objective on the side of civilization, whereas Fascist dictatorships are on the side of barbarism” (Barbarians, 191). But if the Bolshevik revolution had been essential in order to impose socialism, the liquidation of capitalism and the triumph of the proletariat should have obviated the necessity of further autocracy. Instead, with the death of Lenin, the regime congealed as a tyrannical despotism. In its exercise of power rather than ultimate goals, there was little difference between the Soviet commissars and the Fascist rulers. The fault lay with Stalin and his subordinates, not with the underlying ideology. There was nothing intrinsic to Marxism that required that “there should be no communal control of the controllers of power or that personal liberty, freedom of speech, humanity and tolerance should not exist” (Barbarians, 190). The fundamental threat to Western culture stemmed from those who betrayed the ideals to which they owed allegiance. The greatest danger to civilization was
not in Hitler, Mussolini, and the Nazi and Fascist systems, not in the barbarian at the gate, but within the citadel; it is in the economic barbarism of France and Britain and the ideological barbarism of Russia. For both these barbarisms destroy freedom and make the idea of a community in which the freedom of each is the condition of the freedom of all an illusion and a sham. (Barbarians, 219)
Once the war had begun, Leonard was unstinting in his support, while still claiming that, had British and French governments organized collective opposition to Hitler’s ambitions, there would have been no war. Chamberlain’s appeasement policies had left the nation without an alternative to resistance. He was doubtful as to whether victory in this war would be any more likely to achieve lasting peace and secure the rights of small nations than its predecessor: “Yet I believe that we were right to resist the Nazi policy of aggression against the small states of Europe even at the risk of war, and therefore we were right when that government accepted the challenge, to go to war” (War for Peace, 47–8). As long as Britain remained complicit in the system of power politics, force, and aggression—what had in previous decades been referred to as the international anarchy—the likelihood of transforming foreign relations was dubious. On the other hand, had Hitler not been resisted in 1939, “a vast area would be subjected to the most gruesome regime of violence, tyranny, and cruelty.” Furthermore, he argued, it was not even Hitler, “a pitiable emigrant from the mental underworld of neurotic fear, envy, and sadism” who was wholly culpable, but rather the “system of power and force of which he is the disastrous reductio ad absurdum” (Barbarians, 53–4). From the outset Leonard was preoccupied with the components of a lasting settlement after Hitler’s defeat. Responding to a New Statesman article on war and peace aims, he asserted that, if the British wanted to establish peace, they would have to “surrender the Empire,” abandoning their strategic advantages in exchange for international tribunals, peaceful change, collective security, and disarmament.42 European accord required a restriction of national sovereignty and the settlement of disputes on the basis of law and justice. In its existing form the British Empire was incompatible with a stable peace; in order to achieve economic justice within the community of nations, Britain would have to submit to radical changes in its economic organization.43 If the old international system persisted, totalitarian war was inevitable; to avert future conflicts, states needed to renounce war as an instrument of national policy and reimpose a League system. In 1940 he looked ahead to a European union that would not only provide for collective security, but promote economic, social, and political cooperation (Barbarians, 106–7, 224).
On a more private level, Leonard’s war was marked by tedium and inconvenience, punctuated by the tragedy of Virginia’s suicide in March 1941. The destruction in the Blitz of his Tavistock Square and Mecklenburgh Square properties compelled him to spend those years primarily at Monks House, where, as an avid gardener, he was at least able to grow most of his own food. He and Virginia regularly witnessed German bombers heading toward London, and on one occasion German raiders flew so close to Monks House that they brushed a tree by the gate. The couple also attended first-aid classes and donated most of their saucepans for the war effort. In London they refused to enter shelters during bombing, thinking it “better to die, if that were to be our fate, in our beds” (Journey, 38). When the government appealed in May 1940 for Local Defence Volunteers to guard against parachutists, Leonard announced that he would join, even though he was nearly 60, five years short of the upper age limit. Virginia objected, and “an acid conversation” ensued: “Our nerves are harassed—mine at least: L. evidently relieved by the chance of doing something. Gun & uniform to me slightly ridiculous.”44 He acquiesced and remained aloof, but in 1941, shortly after her death, he volunteered for the Rodmell fire service, his duties consisting of night patrols in the village and helping to operate a pump, but incendiary bombs rarely fell in the vicinity. They had discussed what to do in the event of an invasion. Leonard imagined that the very least he could anticipate, as a Jew, was to be beaten up. As outspoken anti-Fascists, they suspected that they would be on the Sonderfahndungliste of political undesirables and consigned to a concentration camp should the Germans invade. Instead they proposed to commit suicide either by carbon monoxide from the car exhaust or by using the morphine that Virginia’s brother, Adrian Stephen, prescribed for them. More characteristically, Leonard’s chief recollection of the war was “its intolerable boredom.” The endless delays in train service from Lewes to Victoria, as he struggled to meet his political commitments or cope with Hogarth Press business, the long walks when returning too late at night to find a taxi, the shortages of paper for book publishing, the restrictions of rationing, the blackouts, were continual irritants to someone impatient with obstacles, physical or bureaucratic. As he later remarked: “If I ever prayed, I would pray to be delivered, not so much from battle, murder, and sudden death, but rather from the boredom of war” (Journey, 65).
As early as 1940, Leonard began to renew his plea for international government. The League, he reiterated, had failed because states refused to fulfil their responsibilities, but that did not mean that only large-scale federation could prevent war. If an international authority was resuscitated, it must be able to enforce its decisions collectively, using peacekeeping forces. As a precondition, he noted unrealistically, it was imperative to abolish national air forces and to impose international control of armaments.45 He envisaged a transition period between the end of war and the beginning of peace in order to lay the foundations for economic prosperity and political stability. This would not happen if “the political structure of Europe remains a chaos of independent sovereign states.” Rather than focus on the unconditional surrender of Germany, he wanted the victors to assure the German people that, once they proved themselves as loyal and peaceful participants, they would be welcomed “as equal members of the new order.” The main postwar challenges were the monumental task of feeding Europe and the shift from a war to a peace economy, a process that required an International Economic Commission under the direction of the United States, the British Empire, and the Soviet Union. But without political security, economic recovery was unachievable:
Unless that political revolution is consciously controlled and directed by our “peace aims”, the whole settlement will be jeopardized by internal struggles for political power by the staking out of international claims fatal to future peace, and by the automatic recreation of that system of international anarchy which, as soon as one great war is settled, makes another inevitable.46
He was prescient in foreseeing the risk of civil wars breaking out in liberated territories, causing “a war of ideologies” that would impede reconstruction and introduce “paralyzing discord” between the allies “upon whose cooperation economic reconstruction after the war must depend.” In the face of territorial conflicts between communist and democratic states, the irreconcilable opponents of Russia would gain the upper hand, and the opportunity for accord between the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union would disappear.47
Leonard took part in a conference on reconstruction, organized by the International Bureau of the Fabian Society in December 1942, and subsequently wrote the introduction to the published papers. Participants stressed international planning to relieve starvation, malnutrition, and disease, to restart the wheels of economic life, and to rebuild ruined cities. They recognized that millions of people would need to be repatriated, including prisoners of war, Jews driven by Nazis into foreign ghettoes, and civilians displaced to labor camps. Relief could be effective only as a prelude to reconstruction, planned and administered by international organs. Before the war ended, there must be an understanding about long-term economic and political policy, feasible only if the three powers pooled their resources and agreed about the objectives of international action.48
Ever since 1914 he had worried about the fate of small states in a multi-polar world order. Both world wars began after efforts by major powers to destroy their independence, yet the doctrine of self-determination was inextricably linked to the movement for democracy and liberty. Since there was scant evidence that nationalist passions had abated, any attempt to ignore such sentiment would undermine plans for postwar reconstruction. If the principle of self-determination survived, frontiers should be drawn to reduce ethnic minorities to a minimum. For the sake of international stability, a charter of rights for minorities should be adopted, and large-scale population transfer considered as an alternative to “the miseries of minority persecution.” Even so, the existence of small nations would remain precarious as long as the international system was organized on the basis of power politics. Rather than consign small nations to dependence as clients of dominant powers, like the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, he sought to curtail state sovereignty by means of a League type of international government or a more drastic system of federation: “There are no other known methods of substituting peace for violence and freedom for slavery.”49
In 1943 Leonard was elected Chairman of the International Bureau of the Fabian Society and, as the war began to wind down, he put together a manifesto for Labour’s postwar future, a preface to a distinctive socialist international policy in place of its former confusion and vacillation. It was essential for the party to define itself in contrast to Tory capitalism, which had produced economic bankruptcy and international anarchy in the interwar years: “We have to create an international authority in which national governments can cooperate for prosperity and through which the irresponsible use of national power as an instrument of national policy may be controlled.”50 The first task was to create an economic and political authority as the nucleus of international government, a radical change based on a universal renunciation of national sovereignty. This body would undertake the planning of production and consumption on a worldwide scale. Much of its power would inevitably be delegated to regional bodies; he cited, as examples, the application of the Tennessee Valley Authority concept to the Danube area or the organization of heavy industry on the Continent by the Germans irrespective of national frontiers, a daring suggestion while the allies were still at war with Hitler. Such proposals injected a stronger socialist perspective than he had previously evinced in his writings on world affairs. On the political side, he was inclined merely to reiterate ideas he had articulated since 1916. The maintenance of peace would depend on a potential aggressor recognizing that the international authority was able to mobilize militarily in defense of law and order. It was not insufficient force that made the League ineffective, but lack of will. For a renewed international organization to succeed, it must have real control of armed forces, in the form of either national contingents (a method later adopted by the UN) or an international air force. In addition, he called for the development of machinery for implementing international law, a proposition that harked back to his earlier writings. He conceded the difficulty of forging unity among the wartime allies once the common purpose of defeating Hitler had dissipated. No solemn treaty could prevent the alliance from falling apart, given the ideological and regional differences: “The United Nations will only remain united if they apply themselves to the definite task of planning an economic and political peace with the same will and international machinery and in the same detail as they have been planning war and the supply of planes, guns, and glass eyes.”51 Nor did the pamphlet avoid particular postwar problems that required practical solutions. On Germany, he asserted that its inhabitants should be condemned for willingly implementing Nazi barbarism, but insisted that “feelings of revenge and hatred are the worst possible foundations of a policy which aims at peace and prosperity.”52 Germany must be treated so as to ensure that it would no longer have the will or power to wage aggressive war, but instead would contribute to European economic cooperation. Initially, disarmament should be imposed, Nazi war criminals punished, and appropriate reparations levied, but the objective should be a democratic and pacific German government once the Nazi regime had been liquidated. Allied occupation must continue until democratic elements resurfaced. In the meantime, free political discussion and the revival of trade unions and cooperative societies needed to be fostered. He opposed any permanent dismemberment on the grounds that a settlement based on “penal truncation” was incompatible with peace. Revision of frontiers with Poland and Czechoslovakia ought to be designed to minimize population transfers. If a peace settlement “entails the impoverishment of millions of Germans, it will entail impoverishment for ourselves and the rest of Europe.”53 Leonard said less about Palestine, but recognized that the transfer of Arab populations elsewhere was as inadvisable as it was in Germany. The only hope of reconciliation between Jews and Arabs was by means of a constitution that would “restore original frontiers” and safeguard the rights of both communities. He wanted an international body, rather than the British mandatory authority, to administer a “just settlement.”54 Once again, he demanded immediate self-government for India, Burma, and Ceylon, but continued to affirm that African territories must remain in the hands of the colonial powers, responsible for educating the people in self-government and facilitating economic development. Finally, he summoned socialist movements, which had established their bona fides through resistance activity throughout Europe, to unite in a new Labour and Socialist International, with the British contingent assuming a prominent role.
The detonation of atomic bombs over Japan threatened to shatter Leonard’s hopes for a new international order based on cooperation among nations even before the war had ended. With its concentrated population, Britain was more vulnerable to the new weapon than other states. Should it be subjected to a nuclear attack, it would cease to exist as an inhabited country. Collective security made sense only as long as weapons were of limited destructiveness, but the situation changed with the advent of weapons capable of destroying the foundations of civilized existence. The solution was the international control of atomic energy and its restriction to industrial purposes. He argued in favor of concentrating all armaments other than those required for internal policing in the hands of the United Nations. Britain might set an example by offering to submit to national disarmament, whereas Soviet distrust might be allayed by sharing Anglo-American atomic energy information with them in order to forestall a Russian bomb.55 He was not, however, prepared to remain silent about Soviet violations of human rights, a perpetual source of conflict with apologists, like Kingsley Martin. Until the cold war became intractable, Leonard remained sanguine about the likelihood of allied cooperation being sustained and nuclear proliferation averted, an expectation that was to prove woefully short-sighted.
By 1947 the mutual suspicions of the United States and the Soviet Union caused both to seek impregnable strategic positions. It was inevitable that Britain, financially dependent on American support, should align itself with American resistance to Russian expansion. While a totally independent British foreign policy was impracticable, Labour might at least seek to build the foundations of peace and security upon genuine impartiality, dissociated from super power maneuvers. Rejecting isolation or neutrality, he coupled reliance on the UN as an instrument of peace with a determined effort to lead non-aligned smaller states anxious to stand apart from power politics. While Britain had been justified in fighting Nazism, “we must not fight in the next war, because we cannot win it.” Refusing to take part in an act of “national suicide” was the only way to evade a coming war. While still complying with collective security obligations, Britain should disengage from nuclear weapons research. Military strength need only be sufficient to deter an attack by a “minor state,” and the government ought to reduce imperial commitments, as well as those in Palestine and Germany. Denying that he was an appeaser, a pacifist, or an isolationist, Leonard asserted that Britain had become a second-class power; refusal to admit this fact was either “sentimentality or blind stupidity.” The only sensible course was to promote policies that ensure that
Britain remains, in everything but military strength, a first-class power. Far from destroying the Commonwealth, it will consolidate and strengthen it as a Commonwealth of Free Nations based on international friendship and cooperation for economic and other peaceful ends, not upon subjection, domination, or military commitments which cannot possibly be fulfilled.56
When the war ended, Leonard resigned from his positions as secretary to the two Labour Party advisory committees. Although he continued to co-edit Political Quarterly with Robson (who returned to the journal after wartime service) until 1959, he contributed few additional articles. Having spent thirty years writing about foreign affairs, proclaiming the need for international government, he had nothing more to say publicly. Through two world wars he held to the view that peace could be attained only if states agreed to substitute collective security for national sovereignty:
It is certain that it is within the power of human beings to prevent war, provided only that they have the will to create and the determination to maintain an international authority capable of imposing peace. But they cannot do that unless each is prepared to surrender to that authority some of the rights and powers of his own national state.57
This conviction infused all his books, articles, and reports from his first analysis of international government for the Fabian Society in 1916 to his last policy reports in the late 1940s. Perhaps he had been naively optimistic or maybe his pronouncements invoked magical thinking. If there was less international anarchy than in the past, power politics and nationalism were still prevalent. To be sure, nuclear conflagration was avoided, and UN peacekeeping operations testified to the viability of collective military action. Enduring peace and deference to international law, however, remained as elusive as they had been at the beginning of the century. Leonard turned his attention to explaining communal psychology, to protecting Virginia’s reputation and literary legacy, and to writing his critically acclaimed, multi-volume autobiography. The polemicist and interpreter of world affairs, the inveterate political gadfly, the consummate committee man, settled uneasily into a role as a public intellectual, increasingly revered the more venerable he became.